Today's Mudline

August 2, 2015

Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk on Obama: "[Wants] to get nukes to Iran."....Dick Cheney on Iran deal: "A lie."....Rick Perry on Obama: "A very, very naive man...who cannot put the dots together."....Donald Trump on Chuck Todd: "I hear that Sleepy Eyes will be fired like a dog from ratings-starved Meet the Press...I can't imagine what is taking so long!... Isn't he pathetic? Love watching him fail!"....Paul Krugman on Trump: "A belligerent, loudmouthed racist with not an ounce of compassion for less fortunate people."....Fox host Eric Bolling on Geraldo Rivera: "Exploits and sensationalizes everything."....Rivera: "You're lucky that you're my friend. I'd knock you out right now. That's absolute B.S."....Oklahoma GOP on food stamps: "The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves."....Keith Olbermann on Dinesh D'Souza: "Stupidest mammal in the hemisphere."....Sinead O'Connor on Kim Kardashian: "What is this c*** doing on the cover of Rolling Stone? Music has officially died."....

Daily Briefing

Deep buzz for the content-deprived

Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy-
fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere.
Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know,
or at least enough to fake it.

One of the first questions Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi took from reporters after announcing her intention to stay on in that job was whether, at age 72, it wasn’t time for her to step aside and make room for younger leaders.

She smiled at the questioner, Luke Russert, as the female lawmakers on stage with her grumbled and booed. “You’ve always asked that question,” she said, “except of Mitch McConnell,” the Republican Senate Minority Leader, who is 70. “Discrimination!” called New York’s Carolyn Maloney. “Discrimination! Age discrimination!”

“Let’s for a moment,” Pelosi told Russert, treat the question as worthy of consideration. “Although it’s quite offensive,” she added, extra sweetly. “But you don’t realize it, I guess. Everything that I have done in my almost decade now of leadership is to elect younger and newer people to the Congress…It was very important for me to elect young women” — especially as she herself didn’t even enter the political arena until the youngest of her five children was almost ready for college. And shouldn’t he maybe spot her the 14 years she spent as a stay-at-home mom?...

And, Voila, Something That Will Finally Stop Your Crazy Uncle From Sending You More Cracked Forwards

No? Then you must not have some distant (or close!) relation who loves to forward, forward, forward, all the live-long day. But for the rest of us, whose inboxes' factual sanctity is under constant assault, there's LazyTruth, a new tool from Matt Stempeck and his team at MIT's Media Lab...

I've argued often that the food system functions like an economic sieve, draining away wealth. Imagine, say, a suburb served by a handful of fast-food chains plus a supermarket or Walmart or two. Profits from residents' food dollars go to distant shareholders; what's left behind are essentially low-skill, low-wage clerical jobs and mountains of generally low-quality, health-ruining food.

But the food system's secret scandal is that it's economically extractive in farming communities areas, too—and especially in the places where industrial agriculture is most established and intensive...

A new website shows the sites hit in US drone attacks -- adding to the pressure for greater transparency from Washington.

The military is normally only too pleased to herald its successes, and to praise the courage of the men and women who put their lives on the line for their country. Perhaps it is the link (or lack of it) between these two that encourages them to talk-up certain missions, and come over all sheepish when it comes to drones...

As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney's get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain's lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be "Orca," the Romney campaign's massive technology effort, which failed completely.

A source within the Romney campaign agreed to share his reflections on Project Orca with Breitbart News...

A five-minute video of Mitt Romney losing his temper has lit up the Internet. The clip, excerpted from an off-air conversation with an Iowa radio host in 2007, has been viewed nearly 2 million times since it was posted a few days ago. Democrats think it exposes Romney as an anti-choice Mormon fanatic. They’re completely wrong. It’s the best five minutes of Romney I’ve ever seen. It’s Romney without the pandering and the phony smile. It’s a man defending his church and his integrity with conviction, nuance, and even an ironic edge. If this is the real Romney, the tragedy of this election is that he didn’t run as himself...

Rove's On-Air Rebuttal of Fox's Ohio Vote Call Raises Questions About His Role

It was 11:13 p.m. on Tuesday, the moment that Fox News had called Ohio for President Obama. Karl Rove stood just off camera, his phone glued to his ear. On the other end was a senior Romney campaign official who insisted that the network had blown the call.

What followed — an extraordinary on-air confrontation between Mr. Rove, a Fox commentator, and the network’s team of voting analysts — drew renewed focus on the Republican operative’s complicated and conflicting roles in this presidential campaign.

What role was Karl Rove playing when he heatedly contradicted Fox News?...

Critic's Notebook: Obama Photo Is A Snapshot Of A Modern, Equal Marriage

Who is embracing whom in that photograph of the Obamas that went viral on election night? The photograph, shot from below and isolating the first couple against a cloudy sky, shows the president embracing his wife at a campaign rally in August. The first lady is seen from behind, enclosed in the arms of the president, whose eyes are closed. Sent from the president’s Twitter account Tuesday night shortly after news networks declared him the winner, the photograph was immediately retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, making it the most popular image in Twitter history and propelling it to instant love across a host of social-networking programs...